


Call It a Win

by SylvanWitch



Category: Generation Kill, The Hurt Locker
Genre: Crossover, M/M, Rough Sex, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-14
Updated: 2013-03-14
Packaged: 2017-12-05 06:20:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/719844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Brad is sick of people trying to blow him up.  He’s sicker still of it being half the time his own people trying to kill him.</p><p>Or, how Marine Staff Sergeant Brad Colbert meets US Army Sergeant First Class William James and things explode.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Call It a Win

**Author's Note:**

> So a lot of people watch the shower scene in _The Hurt Locker_ with a sense of compassion for Sgt. James' situation. I, of course, was mostly thinking, "Wow...it's late at night, empty, and private." It's entirely GK's fault that my brain immediately went to the sexy place after that realization. Naturally, Sgt. Colbert would gravitate toward a private, spacious, well-lit head. Just saying.
> 
> Also, please note that "my" Brad Colbert is a fictional character derived from the HBO series _Generation Kill_ and is in no way meant to reflect or imply anything about the actual person of the same name.

Brad is sick of people trying to blow him up.

 

He’s sicker still of it being half the time his own people trying to kill him.

 

While he doesn’t expect much from the US Army in general, he doesn’t think it’s beyond reason to require that their Explosive Ordnance Disposal units avoid blowing shit up in the general vicinity of friendlies, even if the friendlies in question are wearing dark DCUs and red berets.

 

Which is why Brad’s prowling Camp Victory in the asshole of the night on dubious papers that won’t pass muster with any but the dumbest of gate guards.  He’d caught a lucky break on the way in, blending with a crowd of crowing shit-kickers insisting that they hadn’t missed curfew.  He won’t be so lucky a second time.

 

He’s not sure what he’s doing here, really, except that it had seemed like a good idea six hours ago. 

 

Six hours ago, in murky, waning daylight, they’d been patrolling a neighborhood three clicks to the west, handing out bottled water, band-aids, and smiles, waiting for shit to go sideways, half hoping that it would.

 

The good will guy, Brad is not.  He’ll smile at a few babies, sure, but light him up long on a dark desert night rather than make him sit in an open Victor at an intersection waiting for the crosshairs to caress the perpetual tan on the back of his neck.

 

So he’d already been humming with suppressed tension when the first percussion had shaken dust up from their undercarriage and made Marksey say, “What the fuck?”

 

It came out “Feck,” of course, but Brad had had time to get used to that.

 

A second percussion, closer, rattled the ubiquitous crap on the dash, and scattered the kids who’d gathered around the Victor waiting for handouts.

 

An interrogative on the radio broke the ringing post-blast silence, and Ingerham muttered something unintelligible under his breath and picked up the mic to call in his own question.

 

They got a big fucking answer up close and personal long before anyone back at base could tell them what the hell was happening.

 

Ahead of them maybe forty meters was a walled enclosure of the sort that might once have been a garden, before war had taken a toll on garden and gardeners alike.  The wall was made of baked bricks the size of cinder blocks, but hard all the way through, no hollows or handholds, and each probably older than the US of A herself.

 

It blasted apart in a spewing spray that shattered their windshield and showered them in stinging shrapnel.

 

Overhead in the turret, Marksey ducked and swore a vicious stream.  Next to him, Ingerham shuddered and jerked, hand coming up to cover a wound in his neck that was issuing a thin, steady trickle of blood.

 

Brad was shocked deaf by the blast, shaking his head like it could clear his ears, and just starting to notice the pins-and-needles prickle of glass in the hand he’d thrown up instinctively to protect his eyes when there was a knock at on the frame of the missing window.

 

“Alright?” the guy might’ve been asking, but the blood was pounding in Brad’s head, sound distorted as if he were trapped at the bottom of a deep well of hurt.

 

Guy might as well have been speaking Farsi.  Hell, maybe he was.

 

Whatever the case, Brad gestured that he should fuck off, first in American, and then, just in case (though Brad didn’t see a beret) two-fingered. He didn’t want there to be any confusion about his meaning.

 

“What the fuck were you guys doing here, anyway?” Brad hears a few minutes later, once Marksey’s triaged and treated the worst of Ingerham’s many seeping wounds and Brad’s picked enough glass out of his hand to make a decent paperweight, if he were so inclined.

 

It’s not glass he’s thinking about blowing at the moment.

 

Blowing up.

 

Whatever.

 

The guy, SFC James, if his uniform can be believed—because he sure as fuck hasn’t introduced himself—is shorter than Brad by a half a head but built broad across the shoulders, trim at the waist.  He’s wearing a pugnacious expression that suggests Brad is welcome to take his best shot.

 

“I’m tellin’ you, you aren’t supposed to be in this area.  It’s restricted.  Check your sector maps.”

 

The tall black guy behind him is wearing an expression somewhat familiar to Brad, insofar as he’d caught it on his own face in the side-view of his Victor more than once back in the days when he was riding on Ray’s three.  It says the black guy—Sergeant Sanborn, according to his tag—isn’t responsible for what comes out of James’ mouth.

 

A corn-fed blonde kid, red from heat fatigue or embarrassment or both, is eyeing the crowd of interested onlookers nervously.  He cradles his gun like it might be his best friend.

 

“And I’m telling you that you should know better than to blow shit up without checking your six.”

 

“Whatever.  No harm, no foul, right?  We’re all on the same side.”  James delivers the last with a terrible pass at an English accent, like Austin Powers by way of Andy Warhol.

 

Brad restrains himself by imagining the paperwork he’d have to fill out to hide the body.

 

Now, Brad didn’t get his nickname on account of a cold beverage fetish.  He earned it by being a cool and calculating motherfucker.  But for whatever reason—and he tells himself it’s not Sergeant James’ lips turned up into a mocking sneer and certainly not his tight round ass discernible even through baggy DCUs as he sauntered away—for whatever fucking reason, the encounter ate at him all through the ride back to base and for the entirety of the time it had taken a nurse to debride the gashes and nicks in his hand and for every endless minute he’d sat in the mess trying to get his head past the image of SFC James eyeing him sideways as Brad stepped out of his Victor.

 

There’d been something of challenge in the expression and something of speculation, and at the time Brad had been too pissed off to pay much attention to the latter.  Now, though…

He’s absolutely not fucking thinking about it.

 

He’s going to find James, beat some courtesy into him, and slip off into the night with no one the wiser.  He’s counting on James being the kind of douchebag who sucks it up rather than squealing. 

 

Of course he’s been wrong about a lot of things before.  Why should this time be any different?

 

Camp Victory is huge and sprawling, and Brad hasn’t had occasion before now—shouldn’t have occasion even now, he thinks, and then ruthlessly silences the doubt—to come in this gate.   If the universe were running in its usual indifferent way, he would wander around until someone takes notice of his uniform or his brain stops recycling unhelpful images and then go back to his own unit.

 

Obviously, the universe is paying attention, though, because just as Brad is starting to rethink his exit strategy, he sees a familiar set of shoulders moving from one of a hundred CHUs toward a larger, more permanent structure that even from this distance Brad can tell is the head.

 

The place is an echoing cavern of aluminum over a cold concrete floor.  The glare of the lights is pervasive and unforgiving.  From where he stands in the doorway, James looks older than he had out in the gauzy late afternoon sun. 

 

He’s wearing an olive drab tee, DCU pants.  His boots are untied and the laces slither around his feet as he shifts at the sink, leaning both hands on the rim, gripping, blowing a hard breath into the blind white porcelain and avoiding his reflection in the mirror.

 

Brad takes a step in and watches James tense, use the mirror for a quick check of his six, and tense further as he takes in who it is filling the door.

 

Brad kicks the prop free of the exterior door and lets it close behind him, gentling it into the jam so it doesn’t make noise and betray them.

 

James says nothing, and he doesn’t turn around.  It should surprise Brad, but it doesn’t.  A man willing to take risks with other people’s lives isn’t going to be especially particular when it comes to his own.

  
Besides, they’re on base, behind their own lines.  _We’re all on the same side_ , right?

 

James spreads his hands in the universal sign for _Well?_ or _Bring it_ , depending on one’s context.

 

Brad ignores both meanings in favor of doing a quick threat assessment. 

 

The urinals gleam dully beyond the sinks, and a couple of stalls indicate the shitters.  No one’s in them; the doors yaw.  The showers are empty, those doors, too, standing wide. 

 

Only the hum of the overheads intrudes.

 

Brad doesn’t come any closer to James, just eases his weight back onto his heels and keeps his hands loose and open at his sides.  It’s a position that says as clearly as anything, _I’m ready for whatever you’ve got_.

 

There’s a long, tense silence.

In a showdown between a sniper and an explosives expert, it’s hard to guess who’s likely to make the first sudden move. 

 

At last, though, something weary bends James’ shoulders and he cuts an exhale in half, lip curling into a sneer.

 

“You gonna buy me dinner, after?” he asks, taking the wrapping off the nondescript package they’ve been toeing carefully around.

 

Brad wonders if it’s possible for the air itself to detonate.

  
Then there’s a whoomph as James rushes Brad, bulling into him with a shoulder to his solar plexus and slamming him into the wall next to the hand dryer.  It’s the automatic kind, triggered by proximity, and as it roars to life, Brad grapples with James and gets a forearm across his collarbone, prying him back enough to insinuate a knee between his thighs, spin him around, put his back to the wall where Brad had just been pinned, and raise his knee hard enough between the man’s legs to drive the breath from James and leave him wheezing.

 

When James can talk again, he growls, “You fight like a pussy,” and rocks against Brad’s thigh where it’s pushing him to his toes.

 

“You fuck like one,” Brad answers, pulling away and stepping back.  He can feel the phantom pressure of James’ cock against his leg through his pants.  It makes his breath shake out of him. 

 

James comes at him again, swings a jab and cross combination at Brad’s head.  The guy’s not playing.  Brad dodges the jab, but the cross catches him a glancing blow to the side of the head.  It feels like his ear is on fire, and it shatters his equilibrium so that the punch he means to throw goes sloppy-wide and he staggers, shoulder bouncing off the edge of a shower stall.

 

Brad shakes his head and takes in a steadying breath, brings his hands up in guard position and watches James’ feet, anticipating the shuffle when it comes and stepping into it, stomping on James’ loose laces and bringing him up short.

  
Brad wrings a series of grunts out of the guy with a couple of sharp jabs to the gut that he follows with a right cross that lands solid, splitting James’ lip.

 

James steps backward out of his boots, shakes his head, grins wild and bloody, and tweaks the bent fingers of both open hands in the universal sign for _Come on, motherfucker_.

 

Dropping his shoulder as he comes, Brad catches James below the diaphragm and lifts, taking his weight with a low growl and carrying him back into the shower stall.  He’s got his right ear tucked into James’ chest, but the left is taking repeated punishment from an open-handed slap that leaves him disoriented and wincing.

 

His toe catches on the sill of the shower just as James snags the interior shower frame with a resisting hand, and Brad slips on the damp tile floor, plunging them both into the wall with enough force to wrench mutual sounds of pain out of them.

 

They freeze that way, panting, for seconds that fragment into individual sensations for Brad:

 

James’ heaving chest under his pinning shoulder.

 

James’ left hand testing the breadth of Brad’s thigh.

 

James’ breath bursting hot across his burning ear.

 

Then a noise brings Brad back to the immediate moment, and he realizes it’s a laugh, whiskey-over-gravel, that he can feel all the way to his rigid cock.

 

He eases upright and back an inch, maybe two, so that he can take in James’ face.  The SFC is wearing an expression like a cat that’s made a bargain with a particularly dangerous canary.

 

Wrong-footed, though he can’t quite figure out why, Brad pauses to assess the situation, which is apparently what James had been waiting for, because before he can figure out the man’s intentions, Brad’s been crowded into the corner to the left and inside the shower door, where they’re out of sight of anyone who might wander in.

 

James bites the tense muscle of Brad’s jaw where he’s clenching his teeth against an urge to shout because James’ quick, deft hand has already worked its way inside his pants without even undoing the button, and he’s stroking along Brad’s length outside his skivvies.

 

That laugh comes again, and Brad feels his cock jump against the invading hand.

 

“Wet already like the girl you are,” James observes, stroking back up to the tip to grind the damp cotton there against the head of Brad’s cock.

  
He chokes on a groan, the sensation just this side of uncomfortable, and James bites him again, this time on the thin skin of his neck where it slopes down into his collarbone.

 

“No marks,” he manages, and a third laugh, a little louder and a lot more cocky, breaks across his throat and makes him flush from his chest to his belly.

 

James gives his cock a firm squeeze, holding it to bring Brad’s attention back to the hand in his pants, and says, “Just like a Marine to make me do all the work.”

 

Recovering enough coordination to return James’ favor, he slides his hand along the flat, taut muscle of James’ belly, feeling the skin shiver and the muscles jump under his touch.  James has a light dusting of hair that tickles Brad’s palm.

 

James is free-balling, a fact that makes Brad huff out a startled sound, part humor, part puzzlement.  “Don’t you chafe?”

 

That earns him another laugh, this one short and sharp, as if to inquire what the fuck Brad is doing asking a question like that at a time like this.

 

Brad refocuses James’ attention when he wraps his big, callused hand around James’ cock and drags it slow and firm along his length.  It pulls a sound out of James, a betrayed groan that Brad feels to his root, and he makes the rough motion again, ungentle, feeling the skin of his palm drag against the soft, vulnerable skin of his cock.

 

James curses, a string of bitten-off words, and pumps up into Brad’s hand, at the same time slipping his own hand inside Brad’s skivvies and starting an irregular but demanding rhythm, jerking Brad’s hips forward with the tug.  Brad lets his head fall back against the cool tile wall, feels James’ broad, wet tongue paving a line of heat along his throat, swallows against the velvet push of it, and eases a strangled, drawn-out, “Fuck,” out of his throat.

 

A muffled, “Not that kind of guy,” urges a hitching laugh out of Brad before he remembers he’s supposed to be teaching this fucker some manners.

 

Brad palms the head of James’ cock, slicking his fingers for the return journey, and when he reaches the base, Brad slides further down, his long middle digit tracing the join of pelvis and thigh, delving backward between his balls, drawn up against his body, and back further still to the soft place just behind.

 

This earns an, “Unh,” a feral sound that suggests things they don’t have the time or place to explore.  Brad spares a moment to look at James.  His head’s flung back, eyes almost shut, red, stubble-burned lips open, face slack with need and damp with beaded sweat. 

 

“Fuck,” Brad whispers, speeding up his motions, suddenly wanting this to be done, wanting to put space between them, tuck himself away, move on.

 

James gets with the program, matching Brad stroke for rough stroke, and soon they’re pushing matching low grunts past clenched teeth and spurting hot over one another’s hands, the air between them thick with sex and sweat and hot, spent breath.

 

There’s an awkward span of moments when Brad’s feet start to slide and James braces him at the hips, forehead resting against Brad’s shoulder, James’ breath damp against him and hot even through the material of his shirt.

 

It feels intimate, a sensation James must also sense, because he slaps his hands against Brad’s hips as if to ask _You good?_ and then stands up before Brad can do more than let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.

 

With a show of supreme unconcern, James wipes his hand on his tee-shirt and then tucks himself back into the DCU pants, careful of the zipper for all his nonchalance.  His lips curve into an almost familiar challenge of a smirk as Brad, slower to gather his wits, pushes himself off from the wall and puts himself to rights, wiping the evidence of James’ pleasure onto his own pants.

 

He can’t help but notice that they’re each wearing the other’s jizz, and for some reason it breaks a laugh out of his too-tight chest, a sound that rings in the tiled space they’re sharing.

 

“Maybe I’ll see you around,” James offers then, stepping out of the shower, out of the stall, bending to pick up his lost boots.  As he puts them on, Brad comes as far as the exterior shower stall door and leans there, hands loose at his sides, head still humming with the fight and the fucking.

 

Brad shakes his head.  “We ship out in a few days for Al Faw.”

 

He wants to believe he sees something like regret flash across James’ face, but it’s gone in the shift of light as he turns towards the sink to brace his foot there for easier lace-tying.

 

“Try not to blow up any friendlies,” Brad says then, making of it a peace offering.

 

“Try not to blow any,” James fires back.

 

Brad laughs again, a genuine, full-throated, eyes-to-the-sky laugh that comes from deep in his gut and paints a surprised smile on James’ face.

 

“No promises,” Brad answers through the come-down, laughter still ghosting past his lips in silent bursts.

 

“Yeah, me neither.”

 

Brad sketches a mock-salute and moves toward the door and out into the desert night.  The air is restless with the hum of klieg lights and the distant thrum of a chopper low against the horizon.  It reminds him of explosive charges set off one by one—thwump-thwump-thwump-thwump.  By association, it startles a realization out of him:  He never got James’ first name.

 

Almost at the same moment, Brad realizes it doesn’t matter.  He’s leaving this here at Camp Victory, though the name seems particularly ironic, given that the fight came to a draw.

 

Of course, both of them won something, too.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I have no idea where the real Brad Colbert served when he was with the Royal Marines, but I do know that there was a detachment of Royal Marines in Baghdad at Camp Victory in 2004 and that they also served at Al Faw, guarding southern oil fields and refineries. Since this is a work of fiction--and since I treat Brad Colbert as a character from GK and not a real live person--I'm taking liberties.


End file.
